Something about eyeballs and all bugs being shallow...

Excellent work all around, take the rest of the week off.

I was with you all the way until: less Thai food.

I did the numbers for the year 2025 and conclude that flying there will be cheaper, but then the orange monkey decided to do a short victorious war right in the hood of my favorite transit station to there.

Still using BoxOh

Many, many years ago multiple generations would live in one home that may have even been built by a generation that is long dead.

And now, when mom and dad downsize after the kids move out, rather than selling the house or pass it to one of their children, they rent it out.

Alternatively, they keep the house, but get either a reverse mortgage or a cash out refi to survive until they die, at which point their kids can't afford to buy it from the bank.

Sales Taxes are the worst ones. Burden on seller, burden on buyer, regressive. Income is more fair but easy to mask-out for the wealthy. Property is meh, Wealth tax is the best one. Assuming all were well designed.

Sales tax and the gasoline tax are use taxes. They are about as fair (democratic) as you’re gonna get because it’s based upon use most the other taxes whether they’re high or low, you can’t escape from particularly if you are the average person in the middle, and once again, if you benefit from capital gains, that is a huge life-changing benefit, which most working people don’t have. Vote yes. on proposition 40 if you are in California the less than .001 and even the 1% will easily survive.

Property is literally a wealth tax on an asset that can’t move away

why is it a burden when they are already collecting sales tax? They just change one number but nothing else changes.

Some items taxable, some are not. Keep track. Some have different rates depending on who's buying, keep track. Buyers in different locations pay different rates, keep track. The rules change frequently, keep track. Collect money for the govt, keep track. Remit quarterly or face penalty.

There complexity and overhead on sales taxes; more than on an income, retained earnings or wealth taxes.

Also, sales taxes take more percent of wealth away from the lower wealth bracket than from the upper wealth bracket.

If you kill demand, you kill economy.

And I’m very surprised nobody mentioned cooperative tax in this post. Taxing cooperative profits is the simplest and fairest solution.

If money isn't solving the problem, you're just not using enough.

You can't solve a shortage with demand subsidies. You need to expand supply. SF has too little housing relative to its population, and has perennially tried throwing money at the nonprofit industrial complex which has (obviously) perennially failed to solve the problem because it doesn't generate new housing units, it just bids up and reshuffles the existing ones (and steals a lot of money in the process).

> SF has too little housing relative to its population

The population that's already living in those houses?

Note that "native-born Californians are ~37% of San Francisco County. That percentage has remained relatively flat over recent decades"

  natural population change was positive in San Francisco County, CA, with births exceeding deaths by 574

https://usafacts.org/answers/is-the-population-growing-or-sh...

OK, use money to expand supply. Using more money can make more supply.

Technically, cratering every fortune 500 does solve inequality so at it's purest their argument is right.

I think it's more socialist/communist motivation to seize production I don't think they care about the rich as much as control.

Well one thing is, they'd sell shares to pay the taxes. Then dilute their own ownership of the thing (Tesla, Amazon) and it would serve as another form of wealth distribution.

Charitably speaking: I suspect the commenter above you was indicating that the government should have a stock portfolio you can transfer stocks to to pay taxes in a non-taxable event type scenerio.

If you're taxing wealth (and not income) then switching stocks into cash doesn't change the wealth. Then use the cash to pay the taxes which reduces the wealth.

I believe the argument was that for some people, switching stocks into cash actually do change the wealth, because they own such a large % they are meaningfully moving the market by selling (the "paper money" argument).

And the answer to that was "if you're so afraid that selling will tank the value of the stock, then we [the government] will happily take your taxes as stocks directly, and we take on the risk that selling it will reduce its value".

> And the answer to that was "if you're so afraid that selling will tank the value of the stock, then we [the government] will happily take your taxes as stocks directly, and we take on the risk that selling it will reduce its value".

Yes indeed. It's basically saying "don't bother starting everything because the government will gradually just own it all anyway".

I look forward to buying the dip every April 15th

which is also part of the idea of wealth taxes? to diffuse wealth?

Yes.

I would love to see sales taxes removed and a wealth tax to replace it. Would obviously have to be a graduated roll out. We (USA) need a big changes in these rules; hope we don't need (another) cival war for it.

Why not sshfs? Been using that for ages, since before VSCode existed. Is it suddenly broken?

There is a huge difference between running sshfs and vscode remote. vscode remote tries to completely put the user on the remote machine, the terminal, the environment and anything else the remote box has access to the user can work with it. It allows me to connect to my dev environment (remote box) from any PC, or with the right setup even a browser.

In my team this allowed us to setup a consistent dev environment where everyone has access to the same specs, same environment, easy to manage access control sensitive systems from that remote machine on forward etc... sshfs or using sftp that many of the older IDEs did, don't come close to making it so seamless.

I must have been doing something different then. Ages ago we had devs using remote vns, shell in and also remote mount and then run and debug, they could work from office or home or road; consistent devenv. Granted we had to have cfEngine (then Puppet IIRC) help us. In 2026 we've got containers for almost everything but, I still work with some legacy-ass systems doing things this way. We've added more ceremony and more code but, the workflow is not significantly improved, IMO. I don't get new features, just nee ways of doing the same old.

Nothing is stopping you from doing that still. Personally, I hate the latency in VNC/RDP not to mention the laggy UX, reduced colors, and the overall degradation in the experience.

The nice thing about vscode remoting design is that it’s not that. Even on a high-ish latency ssh connection, the editor buffers are local and the editor UX as a whole is local on your machine so things are still relatively smooth despite high pings on remote connections. Even with vim running in an ssh session, you’ll have a bad time when your latency is high. I know MOSH supposedly helps with that, but I had annoying issues with that too.

sshfs solves the laggness problem, but you are just mounting a remote file system while using your local machine for the build. VNC/RDP/SSH lets you use the remote machine resources for build, but you have to deal with the lag. Vscode remoting lets you use the local machine for the editor UX, and the remote machine resources for LSPs, debuggers, build, etc. yes the protocol doesn’t give you isolation between the 2 machines, but not sure it ever claimed that. I use it from my very under-powered laptop to keep all the heavy builds on a beefy desktop machine with an abundance or resources.

Because vscode needs to run language servers on the target machine as well.